GumboFilé

Gumbo Filé is supposed to add flavor and substance.
We'll see.
I'm adding to the glut of already superfluous information and opinion on the worldwide web.
What will make this blog distinct from all the other self-important know-it-alls out there?
Nothing, really, except that this will be the only place on the worldwide web where you can find all GumboFilé all the time.
You can ignore me, bookmark me, or add me to your list of blocked sites.
I'll be right here.

Sunday, January 28, 2007

Who’s In Love With Mary Jane?

"According to a 1990 study, 90 percent of all first-time [drug] offenders in federal courts were sentenced to an average of five years in prison. Violent first-time offenders, by contrast, were imprisoned less often and received an average of just four years in prison."

European Views of the War To Prevent Southern Independence

Since the Northern press was heavily censored by the Lincoln regime, and the Southern press, regardless of how factual it may have been, is not believed by most Americans, the European journals are perhaps the only credible source of popular opinion on the war during the 1856–1865 period.

Winners & Losers

In the great game of politics, there are always winners and losers because government does not produce anything. It can only rob Peter to pay Paul.

Meanwhile, unlike the "robbery, war, and booty" of politics, every day billions of people interact peacefully in the marketplace, with each party to an exchange coming out a winner because he has exchanged something he valued less for something he valued more. As Mises put it, "The market economy involves peaceful cooperation. It bursts asunder when the citizens turn into warriors and, instead of exchanging commodities and services, fight one another." That is, of course, precisely what happens with government programs, where one group of citizens fights with another to see which group can steal more from the other.

Powerlust

I'd like to see an executive branch devoid of human beings who actually want power and want to use it. That’s an actual possibility in a monarchy (and one of its advantages), but it an almost completely unlikely outcome in a republic governed specifically by those who aspire to political power.

Progressivism, in its 19th and 20th century versions (and most assuredly in its looming 21st century version as well) is a violent creed that demands the bending the individual human will for the convenience of and to the purpose of the collective. The individual only has value insofar as he or she is part of and participates in the great march of Progress. It may not be as overtly brutal or murderous as fascism or communism, but Progressivism is just as totalitarian, just as reliant on force, just as enamored of the state, and just as focused on the creation of a new kind of human being and a new kind of humanity (and the necessary destruction of the old).

The Living Reality of Military-Economic Fascism

In sum, the military-supply firms exemplify a fundamentally corrupt type of organization. Their income comes to them only after it has first been extorted from the taxpayers at gunpoint — hence their compensation amounts to receiving stolen property. They are hardly unwitting or unwilling recipients, however, because they are not drafted to do what they do. No wallflowers at this dance of death, they eagerly devote strenuous efforts to encouraging government officials to wring ever greater amounts from the taxpayers and to distribute the loot in ways that enrich the contractors, their suppliers, and their employees.

Can We Achieve Peace in the Middle East?

Visible Subsidies and Invisible Destruction

In the 1880's, American industry (in real terms) produced a 7 percent rate of return on invested capital. Today, the figure is 4 percent. Suppose that firms retain all of this return and reinvest it. Then they will grow at a 7 percent rate in 1880 and at a 4 percent rate in 2007. Although industry does not retain all of its earnings, the large drop in profitability suggests that a vast slowdown in the growth rate has come about because of the state. Changes in taxes coincide with this slower growth and confirm it. Suppose that the tax rate in 1880 was nil, and that the tax rate today is 30 percent. Then the after-tax return of a 7 percent rate today is reduced to 4.9 percent. A 40 percent tax rate reduces the return to 4.2 percent. As the state absorbs returns and diverts that wealth to waste, both taxes and slower growth reflect that diversion.

The Federal War on Gold

Keep in mind that the Framers had implemented a gold standard so that the American people would be forever protected from the destructiveness of inflation. It was the gold standard – that is, the requirement that the federal government redeem all its paper notes and bills in gold – that had operated as a restraint on government’s ability to print ever-increasing amounts of paper money. The gold standard’s positive effect on capital markets was also one of the primary reasons that the United States rather quickly became one of the most prosperous nations in history.

Kill the FCC and auction off the spectrum

Confessions of an Ex-Conservative

It's difficult to imagine a truly libertarian platform finding any sort of traction with the American people at this point in time. We’re too conditioned to believe in the virtue of benevolent government; too fearful of bogeymen in our age of terrorism; too addicted to the promise of government succor; too intoxicated by the seductive lure of the FED’s easy money. We won’t surrender these things easily. We get what we deserve, ultimately.

Speaker Pelosi – Minimum Wage Queen

Why do so many foods include high fructose corn syrup?

The mechanism is the incredibly high tariff on sugar produced in other countries. The U.S. government would rather force manufacturers to use inferior and hazardous high fructose corn syrup, which can be created from corn – a crop grown in the U.S. – than allow them to use more natural sugar from places that seem rather obvious.

Eco-Intimidation Bypasses Scientific Debate

The New York Times Pushes the Doctrine of Class Warfare

Like a traffic light, The New York Times alternates between Red and Green. The Reds want to abolish the individual’s pursuit of happiness on the grounds that it results in exploitation, monopolies, and depressions. The Greens want to abolish it on the grounds that it results in acid rain, destruction of the ozone layer, and global warming.

A Strange Way to Promote Freedom

War Is a Conservative Entitlement Program

Indeed, the whole Bush war-making operation is an expression of a couple of features of liberalism that conservatives have been scoffing at for decades. One is the entitlement mentality. Let’s face it folks, war has become the conservatives’ favorite entitlement program. We are entitled to a war of our own choosing. Why? Because we were attacked on 9-11. (Besides, isn’t good for the old economy?)

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Minimum Wage and Common Sense

The problem with the minimum-wage solution is that it leads to negative consequences that are equal to—or sometimes worse than—the problem that the policy sought to remedy. Studies over the past forty years indicate that a legally determined minimum wage leads to fewer available jobs, especially for the very people the legislation wants to help.

Restoring the Culture

Culture is what people do instead of government (and, conversely, government is what people do instead of culture). Like bad money driving out good, statism advances at the expense of authentic, organic culture.

Post-Modernism

Many ideologues (Antonio Gramsci being the most famous) consciously promoted the deconstruction of Western culture for the purpose of rendering it more susceptible to the advances of statism. With malice aforethought, they tore asunder the cultural underpinnings of the Western world and left it with nothing.

Statism, Post-Modernism, and the Death of the Western World

The State Is Not the Nation

While the State is a pernicious and coercive collectivist concept, the "nation" may be and generally is voluntary. The nation properly refers, not to the State, but to the entire web of culture, values, traditions, religion, and language in which the individuals of a society are raised. It is almost embarrassingly banal to emphasize that point, but apparently many libertarians aggressively overlook the obvious. Let us never forget the great libertarian Randolph Bourne's analysis of the crucial distinction between "the nation" (the land, the culture, the terrain, the people) and "the State" (the coercive apparatus of bureaucrats and politicians), and of his important conclusion that one may be a true patriot of one's nation or country while – and even for that very reason – opposing the State that rules over it.

Saturday, January 06, 2007

the return of Christian government

It Was Worse Than Taft Imagined

One of the first American statesmen who openly criticized the postwar trials in Germany (which had a less-publicized counterpart in Tokyo for defeated Japanese leaders) was Robert Taft. In a controversial address given at Kenyon College in October 1946, Taft noted that the "Nuremberg Trials violate the fundamental principle of American law that a man cannot be tried under an ex post facto statute." Furthermore, the proceedings that were going on showed "a spirit of vengeance."

one of the greatest abuses of eminent domain in our country’s history

H.M. Cliser owned a filling station. He had lived with his wife for 35 years in the house that his father had built. After Clisler was handcuffed and forced into the back of a police car, his wife and children refused to leave the porch of their house, even after the police had boarded it up. They all eventually moved in with family. Cliser appealed his eviction until he died at age 75.

John Mace had sold water that he bottled from a spring on his property. When he refused to leave his property, the police piled all of his furniture and his belongings in his yard and then burned his house down in front of him to let him know there was no chance of return.

Lizzie Jenkins was five months pregnant when the police dragged her from her home, piled her belongings in horse-drawn wagons, and pulled her chimney down so that she would have no source of heat for the upcoming winter.

Worried About Low Gas Prices?

The last thing Democrats want is for oil companies to discover new oil deposits and build more refineries. Such scurrilous endeavors should be taxed to the hilt to prevent a glut of low-priced gasoline and heating oil at any time in the foreseeable future.

The Democrats also want to raise taxes on oil INVENTORIES, believe it or not – a move which would cause companies to reduce the amount of oil they keep in storage. If that happens prices will go through the roof if there’s even a modest disruption.

What the State Actually Cares About

The state naturally is an organization whose members’ acts are designed to keep the state going with its powers intact so as to maintain the benefits that flow to members of the state. While free market organizations also wish to survive and benefit their members, the difference is that they can’t lawfully achieve those aims without benefiting society; while the state can’t achieve its aims without harming society.

The State Is a Gang

The state is like a gang; the biggest difference being that the state is far worse than any gang because it is far more powerful. Political theorists make a big deal out of the fact that the state allows us to punch a ballot every so often. This means we get to choose between the north side gang and the south side gang, or between the red gang and the blue gang. Since the gangs are in cahoots, this choice makes little difference.

Infinite Regression

Bad people like to use force to prey on good people.Good people require a government to protect them from bad people.This government, in order to be the final arbiter, must possess overwhelming force.

The logical madness is clear. Since bad people like using force to prey on good people, and the government is the greatest concentration of force in society, it stands to inevitable reason that bad people will use the government to prey on good people.

This is the central problem of Infinite Regression: who will watch the watchers? There is, of course, no rational or political answer

Institutionalized Learning

"It’s very useful for some people that our form of schooling tells children what to think about, how to think about it, and when to think about it," concludes former multiple-year New York City (and state) PUBLIC SCHOOL Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto. "It isn’t very healthy for families and neighborhoods, cultures and religions. But then school was never about those things any-way."

Conventional Wisdom

Issues as grave as war and peace demand a thorough debate by a population given as much relevant information as possible, not a country governed by a tyranny of conventional wisdom, not an opinion elite satisfied with viewing enemies as comic book villains.

What To Do About Venezuela

The Criminality of the State

"Democratic" State practice is nothing more or less than State practice. It does not differ from Marxist State practice, Fascist State practice, or any other. Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: you get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you. A citizenry which has learned that one short lesson has but little more left to learn.

A New Perspective on Friedman

As Friedman's free-market credentials are examined, is difficult to consider him a free-market economist at all. Friedman’s theoretical concessions to the egregious ideal of "perfect competition" would permit a great deal of governmental trust-busting, and his neighborhood-effect concession to a government intervention could permit a virtual totalitarian state.

About Me

husband of one wife, father of two adult daughters; approximately 200 years of ancestry in Louisiana and Mississippi; sibling partner in family business started by my father when I was a young child; worshipper of the One True God, the Triune God of the Bible, as confessed in the historic, orthodox creeds of the church. Check out my links.